1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, systems, and products for deploying predefined data warehouse process models.
2. Description of Related Art
To deploy predefined warehouse models to installation sites other than their development sites, such as customer sites, data warehouse systems in prior art often export a set of predefined warehouse models in an interchangeable format such as a file formatted by use of a tag language. IBM's DB2 Data Warehouse Center (“DWC”), for example, exports a set of predefined warehouse models in an interchangeable format file formatted by such a tag language. In the example of the DWC, the tag language is the IBM Information Catalog tag language, an example of which is set forth in Appendix I. Another example of an interchangeable file format implemented in a tag language is the format of the Common Warehouse Model (“CWM”), an example of which is set forth in Appendix II. The exported interchangeable format file, which is generally referred to in this specification as an “interchange metadata file,” is imported in prior art more or less directly into a new warehouse control database in a new site such as a customer site. If the new site has the same environment as the computer which used to build the exported warehouse models, the new system can be set up and run with few problems.
The conventional approach to deployment of predefined warehouse models, however, does not work very well when elements of the models to be deployed are site dependent, that is, when some elements must vary from development site to a new site such as a customer site. Data warehouse applications usually define a set of data sources from which to extract data and a set of data targets for receiving data. These data sources and targets are usually sets of tables defined in different databases. The warehouse metadata generally captures or models the formats of the data sources and targets including the environment parameters of the development environment, whereas the data warehouse extraction processes were built in the development environment itself. When warehouse metadata is exported to an interchange metadata file, the information describing the transformation needed from the source to the target is captured or modeled there along with the default values of the development environment parameters.
Even in a deployment in which the same sets of tables exist in both data source and data target databases, these set of tables can be created with different users. In addition, the tables in source and target databases may be created using default table schema different from the development environment. Warehouse queries usually contain a full name for the database tables (i.e., schema.table_name) and database column names (i.e., schema.table_name.column_name). The interchange metadata file will retain the same representation of queries as they were generated in the development environment. For the customer site with different table schema, the predefined warehouse queries will not work in the new environment.
Customer databases may use database names different from the database names in the development environment, and the customer database maybe managed by different users. These kinds of information are embedded in the metadata and therefore in the interchange metadata file. Interchange metadata files bearing such incompatibilities will not be directly importable into the customer's environment.
In addition to the site dependent data elements mentioned, customer sites often use languages different from the language in which a data warehouse model was developed. For deploying the predefined warehouse process model to a customer site using a different language environment, warehouse products such as DB2 Data Warehouse Center translate certain default names such as ‘Default DWC User’ & ‘Default Security Group’ into different languages in the corresponding language version of the product. A predefined warehouse script in the default development environment, such as en_US, for example, cannot be imported properly into a warehouse control database in another language environment. In addition, in deploying a warehouse process model to an environment with a different language, the entries displayed to the customers need to be translated to the second language, such as, the process name, process step names, and so on. However, most translation tools do not support typical prior art interchange metadata file formats such as the tag file arrangement used in the DB2 Data Warehouse Center. In addition to all the other deployment problems in prior art, it is also true that the size of typical metadata interchange files is very large and therefore challenging to conversion and translation. There is an ongoing need in the art, therefore, for improved methods and means for converting and translating site dependent data elements and language dependent data elements in interchange metadata files for deployment of data warehouse process models.